Google Algorithm Changes in February - Part 3

Welcome back to what is literally the longest blog post ever
written (even Michael Martinez over at SEO Theory doesn't have a
patch on me). In this post I'll be going through changes
21-30. If you haven't caught this series of posts from the
beginning, I'm working my way through the 40 changes that Google
have made to their algorithms, indexing and search results in
February, and you can find the first 10 changes
discussed here and changes 11-20
here.

---

21.
International launch of shopping rich snippets. [project
codename "rich snippets"] Shopping rich snippets help you more
quickly identify which sites are likely to have the most relevant
product for your needs, highlighting product prices, availability,
ratings and review counts. This month we expanded shopping rich
snippets globally (they were previously only available in the US,
Japan and Germany).

As these shopping rich snippets are easy to implement, Google
rolling them out worldwide is something that any online retailer
should jump on as an opportunity. Take a look at these three
search results for "leather office chair":

Notice how the overstock.com search result stands out and takes up
a bit more real estate with its star rating, review count and
price? That's a shopping rich snippet in action. It
means that overstock.com in all likelihood benefits from additional
visibility and an improved CTR, and since Google's new privacy
policy we've known for certain that CTR is a factor in Google's
algorithm.
There are two ways to get a rich snippet with additional shopping
data:

Submit a product feed to the Google merchant center.
Providing the URLs displayed in the SERPs are the same ones that
appear in your merchant center feed, Google will associate the two
and potentially generate product rich snippets for you.

Code your site with semantic HTML according to the guidelines
from schema.org, specifically using the product schema.

Of the two options clearly option 1, although more complex, is
far better, since if the feed is built and optimised correctly you
also get the benefit of visibility in product search, something
that is extremely important given shopping results often take pride
of place in the natural results for specific product queries such
as this one:

Option 2 is the "easy" route, and should be a trivial
development update for most retailers as it typically involves
changing the names of page elements that already exist at a
template level.

Neither option is guaranteed to result in a product rich snippet,
as whether one is shown or not is ultimately still Google's
discretion, but I'd recommend pursuing both options as Google isn't
the only search engine that may interpret semantic mark-up
(schema.org is also backed by Yahoo, Bing and Yandex among
others). Also, telling Google twice (though a feed and
semantic HTML) can't do any harm, right?

22. Improvements to Korean spelling. This
launch improves spelling corrections when the user performs a
Korean query in the wrong keyboard mode (also known as an "IME", or
input method editor). Specifically, this change helps users who
mistakenly enter Hangul queries in Latin mode or
vice-versa.

Google's proficiency at handling misspellings is very
good. Furthermore, where they used to show a "did you
mean...?" link, they now just show the results for the corrected
spelling version, making optimising for misspellings a thing of the
past. I for one am glad of this. Some years ago, when
it was a concern, it was very hard to convince a brand to
deliberately spell something wrong, and impossible to do so in
prominent, visible page copy, meaning you'd have to resort to
slightly underhand methods like putting the misspellings in image
alt text.

23. Improvements to freshness. [launch
codename "iotfreshweb", project codename "Freshness"] We've applied
new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even
more quickly than before.

Not content with updating the way they determine the queries
that need fresh content (change number 14, described in my last
post), Google has also updated the way they determine what content
is fresh. I'm still not sure there are any "signals" of
freshness beyond the fact that the content is... well... new. So,
to me this update suggests that Google has simply got better at
finding new content, potentially using a social network or part of
a social network that they weren't previously using to find
content.

24. Web History in 20 new countries. With Web
History, you can browse and search over your search history and
webpages you've visited. You will also get personalized search
results that are more relevant to you, based on what you've
searched for and which sites you've visited in the past. In order
to deliver more relevant and personalized search results, we've
launched Web History in Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Morocco,
Belarus, Kazakhstan, Estonia, Kuwait, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Tunisia,
Nigeria, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Bosnia and Herzegowina, Azerbaijan,
Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Republic of Moldova, and Ghana. Web
History is turned on only for people who have a Google Account and
previously enabled Web History.

If you work for a company in one of these countries, on reading
this update you may start to wonder whether personalised search is
good or bad for your site. It's as osbtinate problem.
After all, surely personalised search is personal, and therefore
impossible to track given that rank checking software is
depersonalised?
Fortunately not. Since Google now provides rankings for your site
in Webmaster Tools (and Google Analytics, if you've hooked the two
platforms together), and these rankings are "in the wild", you can
use this information and compare it with your rank checked rankings
to see whether personalisation is improving your base rankings or
causing them to drop.

25. Improved snippets for video channels.
Some search results are links to channels with many different
videos, whether on mtv.com, Hulu or YouTube. We've had a feature
for a while now that displays snippets for these results including
direct links to the videos in the channel, and this improvement
increases quality and expands coverage of these rich "decorated"
snippets. We've also made some improvements to our backends used to
generate the snippets.

The development of universal search and the constant meddling
with the SERPs is nothing new, but what I like about this is the
subtle implication that Google ranks video sites other than YouTube
regularly in its search results! This, of course, is a vanishingly
remote occurrence these days. When it comes to video
optimisation, as little as one year ago I think there might have
been a genuine case to be made for hosting your own videos and
trying to optimise them to appear in video search. Nowadays I
think you just use YouTube.

26. Improvements to ranking for local search
results. [launch codename "Venice"] This improvement
improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more
on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.

This is about taking one or more signals that affect the main
search results and applying those to the local search rankings as
well. So, a good way to deduce what these new factors are is
to look at what local search rankings were previously determined
by. To wit:

This chart is the result of an older study we conducted into local
search ranking factors. Essentially what it shows is that there is
a very strong correlation between businesses that rank and the
amount of content on the businesses profile. To put it another way,
this is pretty much "on page SEO" the only exception being
"citations".

I'd say the main thing missing from these signals which we know is
a consideration in the main Google algorithm is something akin to
"trust" or "domain authority" based on links or user signals like
CTR, engagement time and bounce rates. Looking at these
signals would also prevent random small businesses gaming the local
search results by lying about their location, which I've sometimes
seen happening.

27. Improvements to English spell correction.
[launch codename "Kamehameha"] This change improves spelling
correction quality in English, especially for rare queries, by
making one of our scoring functions more accurate.

See 22, above.

28. Improvements to coverage of News
Universal. [launch codename "final destination"] We've
fixed a bug that caused News Universal results not to appear in
cases when our testing indicates they'd be very useful.

For most sites, being admitted as a news source in Google News
is essentially impossible. The list of requirements and the
application process are quite rigorous, involving among other
things being able to demonstrate your journalistic credentials,
that you have well known (or at least widely published) authors
writing for you, and so on.
If that doesn't describe you, then you need to resort to one

29. Consolidation of signals for spiking
topics. [launch codename "news deserving score", project
codename "Freshness"] We use a number of signals to detect when a
new topic is spiking in popularity. This change consolidates some
of the signals so we can rely on signals we can compute in
realtime, rather than signals that need to be processed offline.
This eliminates redundancy in our systems and helps to ensure we
can continue to detect spiking topics as quickly as
possible.

For "consolidation" read "removing some of". This means
Google has dropped one or more previously used sources in favour of
focussing only on search demand and maybe one or more social
networks - the "real time" data sources alluded to. I think
this change is the same as or is related to change number 14
("disabling two old fresh query classifiers"), and, as described in
the last post, this is likely to be that blog and/or news coverage
which is less relevant and also harder to interpret as quickly are
no longer considered as signals of whether a topic is "spiking" or
"trending".

30. Better triggering for Turkish weather search
feature. [launch codename "hava"] We've tuned the signals
we use to decide when to present Turkish users with the weather
search feature. The result is that we're able to provide our users
with the weather forecast right on the results page with more
frequency and accuracy.

It's striking how many of the updates in February are to do with
universal search in one way or another. Although the
prevalence of different result types can seem overwhelming or
annoying at times, it's important to see them for what they are -
namely, additional opportunities to gain visibility in the natural
search results (although to be fair this isn't the case with the
weather "one box" result, making my tenuous segue for this update
even more tenuous). Further, it's usually much easier to
optimise for universal search than for normal search, because the
number of factors at play is much lower. To draw an analogy,
most algorithms powering universal search today are akin to the
main search algorithm in the year 2000.